Quebec, the French Language, and Quebecois Identity

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Different history. The Swiss model is not adaptable elsewhere. Besides in Switzerland the share of the Francophone minority in the Swiss confederation is RISING, not declining.

I know but one can always hope, or dream.

(BTW the share of francophones in Canada is higher than in Switzerland, though yes they are going in opposite directions. It will soon be about the same and then theirs will continue to rise and ours will drop.)

[someone123]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

I agree that long commutes in big cities are not unusual, but, the commute from Moncton to Sackville is 30 minutes at 120 km/hr on a four lane divided highway through dense woodland populated by moose, and with dodgy weather conditions for at least four months during the academic year. Southeast NB is the Atlantic Canadian snowbelt and we usually get at least two nor'easters every month during January, February and March with 30 cm of snow and winds up to 80-100 km/hr. This can be quite challenging for an inexperienced 18 year old trying to get to class on time. It isn't quite the same thing as a traffic jam on the Decarie Expressway.

People also go for their best alternative so if you can live in a place 10 minutes away you won't go 30 minutes away. The fact that there's a long drive through the woods implies there's space for more housing. It's true though that if you want to compare what's available in a region you can generally go farther afield geographically in the less densely populated areas.

This is a tangent of a tangent but the driving conditions make passenger rail more attractive. And just a few years ago there were trains doing this trip every weekday.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

This is well off topic, but I will respond.

I agree that long commutes in big cities are not unusual, but, the commute from Moncton to Sackville is 30 minutes at 120 km/hr on a four lane divided highway through dense woodland populated by moose, and with dodgy weather conditions for at least four months during the academic year. Southeast NB is the Atlantic Canadian snowbelt and we usually get at least two nor'easters every month during January, February and March with 30 cm of snow and winds up to 80-100 km/hr. This can be quite challenging for an inexperienced 18 year old trying to get to class on time. It isn't quite the same thing as a traffic jam on the Decarie Expressway.

The absence of an anglophone university in Moncton means that anglophone students in the city, if they want a quality university education, have to move away from home, and, this automatically doubles the cost of university education for anglo Monctonians (food, lodging, transportation). This is almost a human rights issue.

An equivalent situation in Quebec would be if the only university in Sherbrooke was Bishops, and the francophone majority students, if they wanted to be educated in French, would have to move to Montreal or Quebec City. You can just imagine how insulted the francophone majority population in Sherbrooke would be over this situation. They would be marching in the streets with pitchforks!!!

Pretty sure that was in fact the case in Sherbrooke until around 1960.

And the late 1800s in Montreal I believe.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

People also go for their best alternative so if you can live in a place 10 minutes away you won't go 30 minutes away. The fact that there's a long drive through the woods implies there's space for more housing. It's true though that if you want to compare what's available in a region you can generally go farther afield geographically in the less densely populated areas.

This is a tangent of a tangent but the driving conditions make passenger rail more attractive. And just a few years ago there were trains doing this trip every weekday.

Lakeburn, which is part of Dieppe and on the easternmost reaches of (sub)urbanized Moncton, is 25 minutes from Mount A.

[vanatox]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

This is well off topic, but I will respond.

I agree that long commutes in big cities are not unusual, but, the commute from Moncton to Sackville is 30 minutes at 120 km/hr on a four lane divided highway through dense woodland populated by moose, and with dodgy weather conditions for at least four months during the academic year. Southeast NB is the Atlantic Canadian snowbelt and we usually get at least two nor'easters every month during January, February and March with 30 cm of snow and winds up to 80-100 km/hr. This can be quite challenging for an inexperienced 18 year old trying to get to class on time. It isn't quite the same thing as a traffic jam on the Decarie Expressway.

The absence of an anglophone university in Moncton means that anglophone students in the city, if they want a quality university education, have to move away from home, and, this automatically doubles the cost of university education for anglo Monctonians (food, lodging, transportation). This is almost a human rights issue.

An equivalent situation in Quebec would be if the only university in Sherbrooke was Bishops, and the francophone majority students, if they wanted to be educated in French, would have to move to Montreal or Quebec City. You can just imagine how insulted the francophone majority population in Sherbrooke would be over this situation. They would be marching in the streets with pitchforks!!!

Sherbrooke CMA is 95% French, this is not at all comparable to the language situation in the Moncton CMA, which is 30/70% French/English. It is evident you resent that fact that there is a largish Francophone university in Moncton that dare to have the name of the city in its name (you commented on this before).

[MolsonExport]

back in the days when both Sherbrooke and Montréal were majority English-speaking (yes, this was true once).

By the 1850s, a quarter of the population in what is now Québec was made up of English-speakers, totalling over a quarter million people. They formed a majority in some regions, notably the Eastern Townships, the Ottawa Valley and Montréal. Aside from a small elite that played a disproportionate role in politics and the economy, back in those days most English-speakers were not especially better off than their francophone counterparts.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Pretty sure that was in fact the case in Sherbrooke until around 1960.

And the late 1800s in Montreal I believe.

Doesn't make it right though.

And, the Sherbrooke and Montreal situations have been rectified!

[vanatox]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

back in the days when both Sherbrooke and Montréal were majority English-speaking (yes, this was true once).

By the 1850s, a quarter of the population in what is now Québec was made up of English-speakers, totaling over a quarter million people. They formed a majority in some regions, notably the Eastern Townships, the Ottawa Valley and Montréal. Aside from a small elite that played a disproportionate role in politics and the economy, back in those days most English-speakers were not especially better off than their francophone counterparts.

It has been true for about a total of 2 decades due to huge wave of immigrants from English speaking countries and because many French Canadians had to leave for the US to survive.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by vanatox

Sherbrooke CMA is 95% French, this is not at all comparable to the language situation in the Moncton CMA, which is 30/70% French/English. It is evident you resent that fact that there is a largish Francophone university in Moncton that dare to have the name of the city in its name (you commented on this before).

I don't begrudge the francophone population of the city and province having their own university. This is their right.

I remain disappointed that there is no Moncton campus of UNB. UNB has campuses in Fredericton and Saint John but not Moncton.

UdeM has three campuses - Moncton, Shippegan and Edmundston.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Acajack

BTW the share of francophones in Canada is higher than in Switzerland, though yes they are going in opposite directions.

I am... not so sure about that.

I think what you have in mind is the percentage of native French speakers in Switzerland, but this is a deceiving figure. Switzerland has LOTS of immigrants. What matters is not the number of native French speakers, but the number of people living in a given jurisdiction.

In Switzerland, language use is decided not at the canton level, but at the municipal level. Each municipality decides which of the 4 national languages is the one used in the municipality (for administrative services, for schools, hospitals, etc). There are almost no bilingual municipalities (outside of the Grisons with the particular Romanche/German situation there). Almost all of the Swiss municipalities outside of the canton of Grisons are monolingual. The only exceptions are Bienne/Biel and Fribourg/Freiburg (although in this latter case, the bilingualism of the city is largely theoretical, in practice all public services are essentially administered in French, so the only really bilingual municipality is Biel/Bienne).

So what you have to look at is not the number of native French speakers, but the number of people living in the officially French-speaking municipalities. Within these municipalities there live lots of allophones (Italian immigrants, Albanians, Serbs, etc) who integrate in the French language.

At the last count (Jan. 2022), 24.99% of Switzerland's population lived in the French-speaking municipalities (up from 22.51% at the 1960 census).

As for French speakers in Canada, it depends what definition you use, but I think whatever definition you use it's below 25%.

So Switzerland is definitely more Francophone than Canada today. Not to mention of course that there is no particular linguistic pressure on the Francophone community in Switzerland the way there is in Canada. In fact at the linguistic border it is French that is gaining ground to the detriment of German. Bienne/Biel, which was largely German-speaking in the past, has now become almost half-half, and before the end of this decade the French speakers will probably for the first time outnumber the German speakers there. In Fribourg the French speakers outnumbered the German speakers in the 19th century.

[Acajack]

MonctonRad, I think there may be an investment opportunity in student housing in Lakeburn! Might allow you to retire sooner!

Hurry though before Lio scoops it up!

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

back in the days when both Sherbrooke and Montréal were majority English-speaking (yes, this was true once).

By the 1850s, a quarter of the population in what is now Québec was made up of English-speakers, totalling over a quarter million people. They formed a majority in some regions, notably the Eastern Townships, the Ottawa Valley and Montréal. Aside from a small elite that played a disproportionate role in politics and the economy, back in those days most English-speakers were not especially better off than their francophone counterparts.

Back in those days the Britisher bossed the Indians around, burned to the ground the imperial palace of China in the suburbs of Beijing, massacred the last Tasmanians and reduced other Australian aborigines to human zoos. Ah, the good old days...

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

I am... not so sure about that.

I think what you have in mind is the percentage of native French speakers in Switzerland, but this is a deceiving figure. Switzerland has LOTS of immigrants. What matters is not the number of native French speakers, but the number of people living in a given jurisdiction.

In Switzerland, language use is decided not at the canton level, but at the municipal level. Each municipality decides which of the 4 national languages is the one used in the municipality (for administrative services, for schools, hospitals, etc). There are almost no bilingual municipalities (outside of the Grisons with the particular Romanche/German situation there). Almost all of the Swiss municipalities outside of the canton of Grisons are monolingual. The only exceptions are Bienne/Biel and Fribourg/Freiburg (although in this latter case, the bilingualism of the city is largely theoretical, in practice all public services are essentially administered in French, so the only really bilingual municipality is Biel/Bienne).

So what you have to look at is not the number of native French speakers, but the number of people living in the officially French-speaking municipalities. Within these municipalities there live lots of allophones (Italian immigrants, Albanians, Serbs, etc) who integrate in the French language.

At the last count (Jan. 2022), 24.99% of Switzerland's population lived in the French-speaking municipalities (up from 22.51% at the 1960 census).

As for French speakers in Canada, it depends what definition you use, but I think whatever definition you use it's below 25%.

So Switzerland is definitely more Francophone than Canada today. Not to mention of course that there is no particular linguistic pressure on the Francophone community in Switzerland the way there is in Canada. In fact at the linguistic border it is French that is gaining ground to the detriment of German. Bienne/Biel, which was largely German-speaking in the past, has now become almost half-half, and before the end of this decade the French speakers will probably for the first time outnumber the German speakers there. In Fribourg the French speakers outnumbered the German speakers in the 19th century.

Yes, I know they are definitely in a better position than us.

One major difference is that Switzerland is the product of willful union between quite different peoples, whereas Canada is the product of a conquest of established peoples by a single imperial power. The mythology of Confederation in 1867 attempts to push us mythologically in the direction of "willful union" but there is still a lot of conquest-related baggage that we can't manage to shake.

EDIT: Canada was never really meant as a country to be "shared" equally in terms of opportunity and power between the British and the French, and even less so with Indigenous peoples of course. At best certain minorities needed to be appeased or controlled so that things didn't spill over, but it was always clear who the bosses of the country (the "charter" group) were going to be. Canada did become more enlightened starting around the 1960s and I'd argue has progressively gotten better since that time but there are still deep-seeded things that are difficult to overcome.

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Francophone communities outside Québec are increasingly becoming the last holdouts of the traditional colloquial French Canadian slang language known as joual.

Oh there is still plenty of joual left in Québec but you'll hear it more in its pure historical glory in Timmins ON and Gravelbourg SK.

A lot of classic joual terms are not known to my kids and their friends.

An African coworker moved back to his country and he called me a racist cause he couldn't understand my accent. HR called me to laugh it off.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by p_xavier

An African moved back to his country and he called me a racist cause he couldn't understand my accent. HR called me to laugh it off.

Yo wut?

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Yo wut?

No that's what happened, he told HR that I wasn't making an effort enough to speak international French and said I was racist because of it, like WTF is that shit. I'm the one being affected by the ridiculous amount of immigration. I'm really getting fed up of multiculturalism. So he went back to his country with racial trauma and that he couldn't work in such a racist place.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by p_xavier

No that's what happened, he told HR that I wasn't making an effort enough to speak international French and said I was racist because of it, like WTF is that shit. I'm the one being affected by the ridiculous amount of immigration. I'm really getting fed up of multiculturalism. So he went back to his country with racial trauma and that he couldn't work in such a racist place.

Which country was he from? And where in Canada was he working?

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Which country was he from? And where in Canada was he working?

Sénégal, Montréal.

[Acajack]

Sounds like he had a shitty attitude. There are "international francophones" in places like SW Nova Scotia and rural Manitoba where the local French is an even greater departure from the international standard, and they do just fine.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by p_xavier

Sénégal, Montréal.

Senegalese can be very hard to understand (their accent). So I suppose they find your accent hard to understand too.